Virginia Ivanicki-Strell Grey Area Gallery, 2009  ‘…these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived.’ James Allen   "The Architects of Heaven' series is Virginia Ivanicki-Strell's personal homage to those who flew and crewed the incredible flying machines of WWII. She has created a world where the sky of a timeless world is their playground.

Born in Winnipeg Manitoba, Virginia grew up in a family that had flying in its blood. Virginia's father was an Air Canada mechanic and was also an Air Force mechanic during the War. Her uncle was a WWII pilot of Lancaster Bombers flying out of Britain over Europe. Another uncle was a navigator in the Lancaster and a third uncle was in the Air Force during the war years as well.  Virginia's father often took her to see the huge airplanes in the hangers at his work. As a child she can remember the noisy excitement of taking off in DC-3’s and DC-4M North Stars, lumbering heavily down the runway before lifting up with ease and grace.

Virginia's artistic migration led her to Calgary where she graduated from the Alberta College of Art and Design with a Fine Arts degree and then moved to Vancouver in 1979. She painted sets for film & theatre and was a colour designer for animation, all the while painting hundreds of oil paintings of the coastal areas. The first appearance of airplane as subject was in the 1983 painting of a WWII Spitfire fighter plane swooping daringly low over a building, almost grazing the roof of a yellow 1959 T-Bird parked nearby.

Airplanes didn’t appear again for another eleven years but then took centre stage when the 'Architects of Heaven' series was born. Virginia's surreal oils of WWII airplanes are alternate levels of existence made visible, as they maneuver through damaged buildings that rise above the timeless landscape.  


“There is something so exciting to me about the power of that moment, the near miss, the skill of the invisible pilot  - it is a reoccurring theme in my paintings. However, the elements – building, plane, landscape - are on separate planes of existence. In my painted world, the young men who flew and crewed the War Birds are still flying. Their magnificent machines keep them aloft, defying time and physical reality so they will never collide, or fall, or cease to exist. They are safe.”